There Were Brighter Times
by Missing-Marble
Summary: Series of One Shots. The stories of the Cullens' last days alive. I got the idea from my longer story, Vanishing Acts. Please Review!
1. Edward

**A/N: I got the idea to do a series of stories showing the last days of the Cullen's lives from my longer story, Vanishing Acts. I did Edward's first because...well...everyone loves Edward. So, yeah. Let me know what you think.**

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing Twilight.

**THERE WERE BRIGHTER TIMES**

The boy was dying. That much was clear to anyone, no medical degree required. A slick sheen of sweat had covered his body for the last few days, and he was getting worse by the minute. His heart was slowly, but surely, jumping toward the finish line.

If it weren't for the epidemic, he may have had a fighting chance. But as it were, the entire city was succumbing to the sickness, and he was just another victim. There weren't enough hands to ensure everyone's survival, and this boy was just another unfortunate victim.

His red hair stuck to his sweaty, flushed face, but he didn't have the strength even to lift his hand to brush it away. His thin, frail body lay on the mattress, pathetic in its sickness, but perfect in its form. He was a slight child of seventeen, his life barely at its dawn. The tragedy of it was overwhelming. This boy was bright, talented, and introspective. He was able to read people incredibly well and was frequently able to gather the meaning behind a person's words from the silence following a spoken sentence. He was broken and beautiful and dying.

His body suddenly convulsed, and he began coughing. His entire form shook with the movement, and he collapsed, shuddering, onto his pillow. It took most of his remaining strength to pull the thin blanket closer around his body, curling into himself in a futile effort to keep warm.

This boy had dreamed of serving his country. He had wanted to fight. Just a few more months, and he would have been able to go. The Great War, they were calling it. He had wanted to be great. The greatest tragedy of all is a boy stripped of his dreams and of his dignity.

As he inched closer and closer to his end, the blonde doctor visited him more and more, always gazing at the fragile young boy with sad, longing eyes. He would stay to stare for a moment before walking away, muttering too fast to be understood.

When the boy's mother was taken away, the doctor came back for the last time, his eyes hard. He stood over the boy, watching him in his fitful sleep, overcome with emotion. Slowly, carefully, gently, he lowered himself to one knee and reached a long, pale hand out to stroke the boy's cheek.

He stirred in his bed and, with an obviously monumental amount of effort, opened his eyes, awoken by the doctor's cold touch. His shining, green eyes were an ironic shade of emerald. Even in his last moments, his eyes sparkled with the inextinguishable light of boyhood.

"Doctor Cullen," the boy wheezed, his voice coming out in a low, rasping whisper.

"Yes, Edward, I'm here. What is it?" the doctor asked, taking the dying boy's hand in his own and squeezing it gently to show he was listening.

"It's my," he began, but his attempt at speech failed. He went into another coughing fit and fell, trembling, onto his pillows once more. "It's my mother. Where is she? They took her away this morning."

The doctor felt his heart breaking. He felt it crack, and the fissure grew steadily bigger the longer that he stared into the helpless eyes of the young boy. "She's…in a better place," he said, not meaning for the words to come out in a cracked whisper. He didn't know if he could bear watching another second of pain on this boy's face.

His green eyes slowly moved to his bedside, where a small picture frame rested. "My Aunt Catherine, then. Tell her I'll miss her. Tell her," he broke off, coughing again. "Tell her I love her and that…that I'm sorry."

The doctor wanted nothing more than to sweep the fragile, broken boy into his arms and make all of this disappear. He wished that there was a way. Any way. He watched as the boy's eyes slowly slipped shut, his goodbyes to the world stated.

The doctor's decision was made. He had a way to save this boy, and he had said he would do it at any cost. He glanced around the bustling hospital. No one was watching. No one was paying the small, frail boy any mind. He slowly wheeled the bed to the morgue, his eyes pained and tortured. Once there, he easily cradled the boy in his arms, and started out a window at an alarming speed.

The boy's heartbeat was slowing. The doctor could hear him closing in on death, could hear the blood moving with less and less force. He said a silent prayer that they would both make it through this.

When he arrived at his small city apartment, he laid the boy in a small bed and stroked the hair from his forehead gently, admiringly.

"I'm so sorry, Edward. I'm so, so sorry," he whispered, kissing the boy on the forehead lightly before he slowly lowered his mouth to his neck, as if he were about to kiss him again. With the first bite, the boy stirred, moaning lightly in pain. With the second, on the opposite side of the neck, he began to awaken, his thickly lidded lashes fluttering lightly. By the third, the fourth, the fifth, the boy was writhing in pain on the bed. On the sixth, the boy began screaming. The doctor made eleven bites in all.

He felt overwhelming sadness welling up inside his body, and felt his eyes sting, his body wracking with the sobs and the tears that would never fall. He sat by the boy's bedside for days, not leaving, whispering his constant apologies over and over. On the third day, the boy opened his eyes, and the doctor's grief was gone. The boy had been reborn.


	2. Esme

DISCLAIMER: Twilight and all characters are property of Stephenie Meyer.

**Chapter Two: Esme**

The woman stood at the edge of the cliff, staring down at the rocky bottom hundreds of yards below. She sniffed lightly and wiped her puffy, swollen eyes on her sleeve. Her life was over. She had no reason to continue living. Her hands moved to the spot on her stomach that had been swollen just five days ago. Now she felt strangely empty, as if her entire world had been stolen from her in the blink of an eye.

Memories of the last week flashed in her mind's eye. Seven hours she had lain on a bed, pushing and panting and sweating, until, with a final scream, a squalling ball of skin and bones had been handed to her. She had smiled down at her new child. Christopher, she had named him affectionately. Christopher Michael Platt. She had refused to put the name of the boy's father, if he could even be called that, to this innocent, harmless creature in her arms.

Idly, she kicked a rock over the edge and watched it fall, bouncing on the wall on its way down. Her eyes lost track of the small stone before it reached the bottom. Lost track. That was a good way to put her life. It had gotten off track. Somewhere, she had made a grave mistake. Her mind drifted to Charles.

He hadn't been much of a husband, and it hadn't been love. She had agreed to the union in a vain attempt at pleasing her parents, and had hoped for a little happiness herself. She soon saw her mistake. He was an abusive drunk who had no regard for her as a person. She had been brave and tried, at her family's encouragement, to keep up a happy front, but the effort had grown tiresome. The day he got his draft letter had been the happiest day of her short life. He went to Europe, and she had the house all to herself. Three years of freedom. When he returned, she had hoped they would be able to start over. Had hoped that the war may have shaped him into a better man. It had done anything but, and she soon discovered her pregnancy. With the added motivation of a child to protect, she had fled him. He was not the good, kind man she had hoped to marry someday.

That man had already come and gone, she thought bitterly, glaring at the rocks below as if they had done her some horrible personal foul. She had been sixteen years old when she had broken her leg and been treated by the most beautiful person she had ever seen. She had been infatuated by him and, as childish as it may sound, she still harbored a deep longing for the mysterious, golden eyed doctor from a decade previous.

After four days of relative happiness with her new son, he had been taken from her as well. A lung complication, the doctors had told her. She didn't care what the reason. All that mattered was that she had been forced to flee from her own husband, she would never again see the man of her dreams, and now her own Christopher Michael had been stolen from her at the dawn of his life.

Her breathing had picked up as she stood over the edge of the cliff, contemplating the life that lay around her in a shambles. A single tear rolled down her cheek. "Goodbye, Christopher," she whispered into the wind, and took the fatal step.

She hardly noticed the alarming speed at which the world was falling by. She felt oddly peaceful during her plunge toward the rocks. Her world had taken on a sense of serenity, and she knew her suffering was about to end. With a sickening crunch, she collided with the hard, earthen floor, and everything disappeared. Fade to black. Flat line. She did not awake after this.

Dr. Carlisle Cullen walked slowly through the stark white halls of the hospital, his mind far away. It usually was these days. His thoughts often drifted to his young son, Edward. The boy had left him almost a year ago with no promise of return and an idea of "helpful murder" in his mind. He had hoped that, by means of his mind reading, he would be able to identify those who were not much more human than himself. While the idea of murdering a serial rapist was better than the idea of killing innocent citizens, it was still murder. The blonde doctor grimaced at the imagined image of his son with glistening burgundy eyes.

He sighed lightly as he wandered the building. He had taken to walking lately to free his mind. as he rounded the corner of the hall that lead to the morgue, somewhere in the back of his distracted mind, he picked up the sound of a heartbeat was coming from the room. It was faint and slowing, but it was still beating. Cautiously, he peered in the glass window of the door. The room was empty.

He opened the door and darted inside, quickly locating the source of the noise. Three drawers up from the ground in the seventh row on the right. He was at the spot before a second had passed. He took a deep breath before sliding it open. The scent that tickled his nose was a familiar one. He had not smelled it for many years, but he was sure he had known this person before. He gazed down at the face of the woman on the table before him. Her face and body were beaten to the point of nearly being unrecognizable.

As he stared down at her, a memory, buried deep under everything he had been thinking of in the past decade, flashed to the front of his mind's eye. The happy, glowing teenage girl of sixteen that had broken her leg one summer afternoon spent climbing a tree. His eyes widened as the memory came back to him in full. Was it possible that this woman, left for dead, was the same giggling, blushing, exuberant girl?

He debated with himself briefly. She was clearly going to die. Her condition was as dire as Edward's had been just a few years ago. But would the venom be potent enough to cure so many wounds? Or would she resent him for eternity for leaving her scarred and immortal? He felt a pull toward this woman, and simply could not leave her to die in this room. She held almost as much of his affection as Edward had when he had stolen the poor, broken, feminine boy from the hospital bed.

As he had done just three years ago, he scooped the body into his cold, solid arms and escaped the hospital. He brought her back to his apartment and laid her out on the small bed. Just as he was about to lean in and deliver the bites, his mind flickered to his son once more.

_What if she cannot be controlled?_ a wicked voice in the back of his head asked.

He glanced down at the scar on his left forearm that had been left by his only son during the first few months of his new life. He rubbed it absent mindedly as he watched this beaten woman die. As if giving a signal, her heart gave a particularly loud flop. He took it as a sign.

He bent down and sunk his teeth into her neck. It pained him to watch her silent transformation almost as much as it had hurt to watch Edward thrashing on the bed. She was so broken that she was unable to feel the molten lava flowing through her veins. She was unable to scream, unable to protest.

She awoke with a wild gasp almost three days later, her eyes flying open. She immediately saw him sitting in the corner, watching her warily and, before either of them knew what had happened, she was in his arms, muttering very fast about being sent to heaven after all.


	3. Rosalie

**A/N: Okay, so not many people are reading this, but I figured I'd do Rosalie since I did get som positive feedback on the others. Let me know what you think!**

**vampirechick123: Thanks. Yeah, Carlisle's kind of a tortured soul I guess.**

**MissyAnn7448: Why thank you! :) Haha. It must be done! I was kind of debating with myself over whether or not I wanted to do Jo's and William's deaths, mostly because they're not "actual" Twilight characters, but I think I will. Mostly because it would be interesting to write (or read) their deaths in a third person view. :)**

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Twilight.

**Chapter Three: Rosalie**

She was proud and she was vain and she was arrogant. She realized this in the last few moments of consciousness, the truth sinking in so profoundly that she was sure it was the very cause of her demise. Nothing had ever struck her so completely as this sudden epiphany, and it pained her to know that she had spent her life, wasted it really, in the fruitless struggle for perfection.

The men were rough with her, but she didn't try to resist. She knew that there was no way she would win out against them. But, through the haze of the blows and the pain and the violation, her mind was despairing, agonizing over the little things she had missed out on. She knew this was the end for her, and she wished she had been able to enjoy the full pleasures of life. She knew she was young and had been stupid.

Her mind drifted then to Vera. Vera and her beautiful, dark haired son. She was so lucky to have the joys of a perfect life. Vera would grow old with her husband sitting faithfully and contentedly by her side, would watch her bouncing baby boy grow into a strong young man, and would die an elderly woman, warm in her bed.

Instead, she thought bitterly, here she was, lying on the street in a bloodied mess while Royce and his friends did what they wanted. She knew instinctively that she would be left for dead. This thought didn't bother her. Not nearly as much as the knowledge of her childlessness did. She wanted nothing more than to hold her own little baby in her arms, warm and soft and unconditionally adoring.

Then, with another sudden epiphany, she realized that, as much as she wanted a child, she would be horrified to bring an innocent into the world with a part of this horrible man in it. That would be wholly unfair to the baby. No one deserved to have any fraction of Royce King Jr. in them. She felt as though she were secretly winning. In a sick, twisted, slightly deranged way, she was triumphant.

She didn't notice when the blows ceased, but she knew afterward that she was lying cold and motionless on the hard stone of the alley, and understood that her brief flicker of intuition had been correct. She was left for dead. A small smile graced her lips at the thought of preventing Royce a child before she slipped fully into unconsciousness.

* * *

Doctor Cullen walked out of the small hospital into the night air of Rochester, breathing the clean oxygen in. The smell of human blood didn't affect him the way it did the others, but it was nice to not have that annoying tickle at the back of his throat for a while. He walked slowly, his hands in his pockets. He hummed softly to himself, tunelessly.

His life seemed perfect for the moment. He had his new wife, Esme, and Edward had finally returned. The boy had been slightly resistant to the new addition to their small family at first, but Esme was such a kind and nurturing soul that he accepted her quickly.

He took a deep breath of the night air, letting it out with a sigh. He was happy and content. Happier than he had ever expected to be as a vampire. The real reason for his current sense of elation was Edward's renewed presence in his life. The boy was his son in so many ways, but he was also his best friend. He 

loved Esme, but he would always hold his love for Edward above all else. It was a different kind of love. It was their years together as solitary companions that had caused the deep devotion.

When the doctor took another breath in, the familiar itching at the back of his throat returned. There was a human injured nearby. By the strength of the scent, the person was bleeding profusely. He followed his senses, searching for the source of the smell. His eyes quickly found it.

The girl was lying on the hard stone of the alleyway, her flowing blonde hair in a tangled mass around her face. She was covered in cuts and he could see bruises beginning to form on her arms and upper cheekbones and on the insides of her thighs. The bottom half of her clothing was lying in a crumpled heap a few feet from her head. Her body was curled in on itself in a fetal position, and she was muttering slightly to herself. The words would not have been audible to anyone with weaker ears, but the doctor heard her very clearly.

Her lips barely moved as she whispered, "Stopped him. No child. I stopped him." She said it over and over, the stream of words never halting. He wondered if she even realized she was speaking.

Carlisle recognized this woman. He had seen her parading around Rochester, head held high. She'd had a very obvious distaste for his family, and he couldn't help but wonder if it had been a result of their physical perfection. He gazed down at the crumpled form of Rosalie Hale, listening to the small voice of inspiration speak in his ear.

He knew she wouldn't make it if he left her here. She wouldn't make it even if he took her to the hospital. And Edward was lonely. He wanted his son to be as happy as he was with his wife. He wanted that for the boy. It was wrong, he knew, to take this woman away from what she thought was certain death, only to bring her into the hellish reality of a vampiric life. But maybe, he thought, just maybe it wasn't quite as bad as he had first assumed. The very fact that he had been able to find a woman to love was proof of that. Edward was miserable in this life. He needed someone like Esme. Someone to save him from himself.

Before the doctor even knew what was happening, he had the girl cradled in his arms. She felt the change in temperature that his arms caused, felt the motion of his running. She was stirring by the time he reached the house. The door was flung open before he could reach for the knob, Edward standing there with an incredulous look on his face.

"What are you doing?" he asked, his voice outraged. "Why is she here?"

"She's dying, Edward," the doctor responded, sweeping into the room and placing her gently on a couch.

"What does that have to do with us? Carlisle, why did you bring her here?" the boy asked again.

Carlisle looked his son in the eye, seeing the way his irises had made the quick switch from amber to black in the short moment that Rosalie had been in their home. The boy's jaw was clenched in acute 

restraint, his fists balled at his sides. As the doctor watched, Edward twitched toward her body, but forced himself to leave her alive.

"I…I can't do this, Carlisle. I'm sorry," he said, his voice cracking. He lowered his head in shame and started for the door. "Esme left as soon as she smelled the girl," he added, answering the doctor's unspoken question.

Carlisle just nodded. He crouched down by the girl's side, placing one hand on either side of her body. He bent his face to her neck, sinking his teeth into all the same spots he had for Edward and Esme.

Rosalie awoke fully then, her startlingly violet eyes fluttering open. "No," she moaned. "Anyone but you."

He hadn't been wrong to assume that she disliked his family. He watched sadly as she writhed in pain, screaming all the time. He knew her awakening would not be a happy affair, as Esme's had been. It wouldn't be relieving like Edward's. He could only hope that, in time, she would grow to accept this new life. He hoped she would find comfort in his son. He wanted her to be happy.

"Good luck, Rosalie," he muttered, turning his back on her and leaving the room. "You'll need it."

* * *

**A/N: Don't forget to review! :)**


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